Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Greek: Διονύσιος ὁ Ἀρεοπαγίτης), also known as Pseudo-Denys, was a Christian theologian and philosopher of the late 5th to early 6th century (writing before 532), probably Syrian, the author of the set of works commonly referred to as the Corpus Areopagiticum or Corpus Dionysiacum. The author pseudonymously identifies himself in the corpus as "Dionysios", portraying himself as the figure of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of St. Paul mentioned in Acts 17:34.[1] This false attribution to the earliest decades of Christianity resulted in the work being given great authority in subsequent theological writing in both East and West, with its influence only decreasing in the West with the fifteenth century demonstration of its later dating.

In recent decades, interest has increased again in the Corpus Areopagiticum for three main reasons: in part because of a recovery of the huge impact of Dionysian thought in later Christian thought, in part because of an increasing repudiation of older criticisms that Dionysius's thought represented a fundamentally Neoplatonic and therefore non-Christian approach to theology, and finally because of interest in parallels between aspects of modern linguistic theory and Dionysius's reflections on language and negative theology.

Dating

In attempts to identify a date after which the corpus must have been composed, a number of features have been identified in Dionysius' writing, though the latter two are subject to scholarly debate.

Firstly, and fairly certainly, it is clear that Dionysius adopted many of his ideas — including at times passages almost word for word — from Proclus, who died in 485 — thus providing at the least a late fifth century early limit to the dating of Dionysius.[2]

In the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy Dionysius twice seems to allude to the recitation of the Creed in the course of the liturgy (EH 3.2 and 3.III.7). It is often asserted that Peter the Fuller first mandated the inclusion of the Nicene Creed in the liturgy in 476, thus providing an earliest date for the composition of the Corpus. However, Bernard Capelle argues that it is far more likely that Timothy, patriarch of Constantinople, was responsible for this liturgical innovation, around 515 — thus suggesting a later date for the Corpus.[3]

It is often suggested that because Dionysius seems to eschew divisive Christological language, he was probably writing after the Henoticon of Zeno was in effect, sometime after 482. However, it is also possible that Dionysius eschewed traditional Christological formulae in order to preserve an overall apostolic ambience for his works, rather than because of the influence of the Henoticon. Also, given that the Henoticon was rescinded in 518, if Dionysius was writing after this date, he may have been untroubled by this policy.[4]

In terms of the latest date for the composition of the Corpus, the earliest datable reference to Dionysius' writing comes in 528, the year in which the treatise of Severus of Antioch entitled Adversus apologiam Juliani was translated into Syriac — though it is possible the treatise may originally have been composed up to nine years earlier.[5]

Another widely cited latest date for Dionysius' writing comes in 532, when, in a report on a colloquy held between two groups (orthodox and monophysite) debating the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon, Severus of Antioch and his monophysite supporters cited the Fourth Letter in defence of their view.[6] It is possible that pseudo-Dionysius was himself a member of this group, though debate continues over whether his writings do in fact reveal a monophysite understanding of Christ.[7] It seems likely that the writer was located in Syria, as revealed, for example, by the accounts of the sacramental rites he gives in The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which seem only to bear resemblance to Syriac rites.[8]

Thought

The Corpus is today composed of Divine Names (Περὶ θείων ὀνομάτων), Mystical Theology (Περὶ μυστικῆς θεολογίας), Celestial Hierarchy (Περὶ τῆς οὐρανίου ἱεραρχίας), Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (Περὶ τῆς ἐκκλησιαστικῆς ἱεραρχίας), and ten epistles.[9] Seven other works, namely Theological Outlines (Θεολογικαὶ ὑποτυπώσεις), Symbolic Theology (Συμβολικὴ θεολογία), On Angelic Properties and Orders (Περὶ ἀγγελικῶν ἰδιοτήτων καὶ τάξεων), On the Just and Divine Judgement (Περὶ δικαίου καὶ θείου δικαστηρίου), On the Soul (Περὶ ψυχῆς), On Intelligible and Sensible Beings,[10] and On the Divine Hymns,[11] are mentioned repeatedly by pseudo-Dionysius in his surviving works, and are presumed either to be lost[12] or to be fictional works mentioned by the Areopagite as a literary device to give the impression to his sixth century readers of engaging with the surviving fragments of a much larger first century corpus of writings.[13]

There is a distinct difference between pagan Neoplatonism and that of Eastern Christianity. In the former all life returns to the source to be stripped of individual identity, a process called henosis,[15] while in orthodox Christianity the Likeness of God in man is restored by grace (by being united to God the Holy Trinity through participation in His divine energies), a process called theosis.[16]

Eastern adoption

His thought was initially used by monophysites to back up parts of their arguments but his writings were eventually adopted by other church theologians, primarily due to the work of John of Scythopolis and Maximus the Confessor in producing an orthodox interpretation.[17] Writing a single generation at most after Dionysius, perhaps between 537 and 543,[18] John of Scythopolis composed an extensive set (around 600)[19] of scholia (that is, marginal annotations) to the works of Dionysius; these were in turn prefaced by a long prologue in which John set out his reasons for commenting on the corpus. All Greek manuscripts of the Corpus Areopagiticum surviving today stem from an early sixth-century manuscript containing John's Scholia and Prologue — so John of Scythopolis had an enormous influence on how Dionysius was read in the Greek-speaking world.[20]

The Dionysian writings and their mystical teaching were universally accepted throughout the East, amongst both Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians. St. Gregory Palamas, for example, in referring to these writings, calls the author, "an unerring beholder of divine things".

Western medieval Dionysian tradition

The first notice of Dionysius in the West comes from Gregory the Great, who probably brought a codex of the Corpus Areopagitum back with him on his return from his mission as papal legate to the Emperor in Constantinople in around 585. Gregory refers occasionally in his writings to Dionysius, although Gregory's Greek was probably not good enough to fully engage with Dionysius's work.[21] In the seventh and eighth centuries, Dionysius was not widely known in the West, aside from a few scattered references.

The real influence of Dionysius in the West, however, began with the gift in 827 of a Greek copy of his works by the Byzantine Emperor Michael II to the Carolingian King Louis the Pious, who in turn gave the manuscript to the monastery of St Denys near Paris.[22] About 838, Dionysius' works were translated into Latin for the first time by Hilduin, abbot of the monastery of St Denys near Paris. It may well have been Hilduin himself who promoted his work (and his abbey) by developing the legend (which would be widely accepted during subsequent centuries), that Saint Denis of Paris was the same person as Saint Dionysius the Areopagite of Acts 17.34, and that Saint Dionysius the Areopagite had traveled to Rome and then was commissioned by the Pope to preach in Gaul (France), where he was martyred.[23][24] Hilduin's translation, however, is almost unintelligible.[25]

About twenty years later, a subsequent Carolingian Emperor, Charles the Bald, requested the Irishman John Scottus Eriugena to make a fresh translation; he finished this in 862.[25] However, this translation itself did not widely circulate in subsequent centuries. Moreover, although Eriugena’s own works, such as the Homily on the Prologue of St John, show the influence of Dionysian ideas, these works were not widely copied or read in subsequent centuries.[25] The Benedictine monasticism that formed the standard monasticism of the eighth to eleventh centuries, therefore, in general paid little attention to Dionysius.

In the twelfth century, greater use gradually began to be made of Dionysius among various traditions of thought:

Among Benedictines (especially at the Abbey of Saint-Denis), greater interest began to be shown in Dionysius. For example, one of the monks of Saint Denys, John Sarrazin, wrote a commentary on The Celestial Hierarchy in 1140, and then in 1165 made a translation of the work.[25] Also, Suger, abbot of Saint-Denis from 1122 to 1151, drew on Dionysian themes to explain how the architecture of his new 'Gothic' abbey church helped raise the soul to God.[26]

It is in the Schools, though, that the twelfth-century growth in influence of Dionysius was truly significant. There are few references to Dionysius in scholastic theology during the tenth and eleventh centuries. At the beginning of the twelfth century, though, the masters of the Cathedral school at Laon, especially Anselm of Laon, introduced extracts from Eriugena’s Commentary on St John into the Sentences and the Glossa Ordinaria. In this manner, Dionysian concepts found their way into the writing of Peter Lombard and others.[25]

Astronomical fresco

In a letter addressed to Polycarp, pseudo-Dionysius asks "What have you to say about the solar eclipse which occurred when the Savior was put on the Cross? At the time the two of us were in Heliopolis[29] and we both witnessed the extraordinary phenomenon of the moon hiding the sun at the time that was out of season for their coming together.... We saw the moon begin to hide the sun from the east, travel across to the other side of the sun, and return on its path so that the hiding and the restoration of the light did not take place in the same direction but rather in diametrically opposite directions...."[30]

In reality, an eclipse (of the sun by the moon) could not have happened at the time of Christ's crucifixion since Passover (when the Gospels state the Crucifixion took place) is a full moon event, and solar eclipses always happen at new moon. It seems probable that pseudo-Dionysius had read the Alexandrinus variant of Gospel of Luke (Luke 23:44-45) where the darkness said to have accompanied the Crucifixion is attributed to an eclipse,[31] and that this influenced his writing.

Only in the late medieval period did the scientific incoherence of the legend become widely acknowledged: in 1457, for instance, the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla wrote: "...the claim of 'Dionysius'... that he observed the eclipse of the sun at the hour of the Saviour's death... is as blatant a fiction as the epistolary form of the report."[33]

Authorship

The authorship of the Dionysian Corpus was initially disputed; Severus and his party affirmed its apostolic dating, largely because it seemed to agree with their Christology. However, this dating was disputed by Hypatius of Ephesus, who met the monophysite party during the 532 meeting with Emperor Justinian I; Hypatius denied its authenticity on the grounds that none of the Fathers or Councils ever cited or referred to it. Hypatius condemned it along with the Apollinarian texts, distributed during the Nestorian controversy under the names of Pope Julius and Athanasius, which the monophysites entered as evidence supporting their position.[34]

The first defense of its authenticity is undertaken by John of Scythopolis, whose commentary, the Scholia (ca. 540), on the Dionysian Corpus constitutes the first defense of its apostolic dating, wherein he specifically argues that the work is neither Apollinarian nor a forgery, probably in response both to monophysites and Hypatius—although even he, given his unattributed citations of Plotinus in interpreting Dionysius, might have known better.[35] Dionysius' authenticity is criticized later in the century, and defended by Theodore of Raithu; and by the 7th century, it is taken as demonstrated, affirmed by both Maximus the Confessor and the 649 Lateran Council. From that point until the Renaissance, the authorship was less questioned, though Thomas Aquinas,[36]Peter Abelard and Nicholas of Cusa expressed suspicions about its authenticity; their concerns, however, were generally ignored.[37]

The Florentine humanist Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457), in his 1457 commentaries on the New Testament, did much to establish that the author of the Corpus Areopagiticum could not have been St. Paul's convert, though he was unable to identify the actual historical author. William Grocyn pursued Valla's lines of text criticism, and Valla's critical viewpoint of the authorship of the highly influential Corpus was accepted and publicized by Erasmus from 1504 onward, for which he was criticized by Catholic theologians. In the Leipzig disputation with Martin Luther, 1519, Johann Eck used the Corpus, specifically the Angelic Hierarchy, as argument for the apostolic origin of papal supremacy, pressing the Platonist analogy, "as above, so below".

During the 19th century modernist Catholics too came generally to accept that the author must have lived after the time of Proclus. The author became known as 'Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite' only after the philological work of J Stiglmayr and H Koch, whose papers, published independently in 1895, demonstrated the thoroughgoing dependence of the Corpus upon Proclus.[37] Both showed that Dionysius had used, in his treatise on evil in Chapter 4 of The Divine Names, the De malorum subsistentia of Proclus.

There was no concept of intellectual property in the ancient world, and plagiarism was widely seen as a homage to the original author. The Stanford Encyclopedia claims "It must also be recognized that 'forgery' is a modern notion. Like Plotinus and the Cappadocian Fathers before him, Dionysius does not claim to be an innovator, but rather a communicator of a tradition."[38] However, while the Pseudo Dionysius can be seen as a communicator of tradition, he can also be seen as a polemicist, who tried to alter Neo-Platonic tradition in a novel way for the Christian world that would make notions of complicated Divine Hierarchies more of an emphasis than notions of direct relationship with the figure of Christ as Mediator.[42]

Modern appraisal

Andrew Louth offers the following modern appraisal of the Areopagite;

Dionysius/Denys' vision is remarkable because, on the one hand, his understanding of hierarchy makes possible a rich symbolic system in terms of which we can understand God and the cosmos and our place within it, and, on the other, he finds room within this strictly hierarchical society for an escape from it, beyond it, by transcending symbols and realizing directly one's relationship with God as his creature, the creature of his love.

There is space within the Dionysian universe for a multitude of ways of responding to God's love. That spaciousness is worth exploring: and therein, perhaps, lies the enduring value of the vision of Dionysius/Denys the Areopagite.[43]

See also

References

↑Acts 17:34 “A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.” The Areopagus of Athens was an open-air law court, a site for public declamations. Various legends existed in the early surrounding the figure of Dionysius, who became emblematic of the spread of the gospel to the Greek world. A tradition quickly arose that he became the first bishop of Cyprus or of Milan, or that he was the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews; according to Eusebius, he was also said to be the first bishop of Athens. It is therefore not surprising that that author of these works would have chosen to adopt the name of this otherwise briefly mentioned figure. (See Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius, (1987), p22.)

↑This was, in particular, due to the research of Stiglmayr and Koch in the late nineteenth century.

↑Paul Rorem and John C Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Areopagite, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p9. The point was first proposed by Stiglmayr.

↑Paul Rorem and John C Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Areopagite, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p9. The point was first proposed by Stiglmayr.

↑Hathaway, Hierarchy and the Definition of Order in the Letters of Pseudo-Dionysius, p. 4, supports the dating of 519 for this treatise.

↑Andrew Louth, Dionysius the Areopagite, (1987),, reissued by Continuum Press, London & New York, 2001, under the title Denys the Areopagite.

↑See Louth, Dionysius the Areopagite, (1987), p14, who suggests that, although ambiguous, Dionysius is not monophysite (he also points out that Severus and his supporters misquote Dionysius's Fourth Epistle to back up their view). Paul Rorem and John C Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Areopagite, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), esp p11, make an extensive study of the early evidence, arguing that (1) Hypatius's apparent rejection in 532 of the works of Dionysite as monophysite is not as straightforward as often suggested, and that (2) Dionysius's writing was appealed to by just about all parties in the sixth-century Christian east, and at no point was it considered the exclusive preserve of the Monophysites.

↑Dionysius' description in the Ecclesastical Hierarchy corresponds well with what is known of Syriac worship from other sources, for example: (1) his account of baptism and the Eucharist is similar to the Homilies on Baptism and the Eucharist of Theodore of Mopsuetsia, which depict worship in the Church of West Syria at the beginning of the fifth century. See Louth, Dionysius the Areopagite, (1987), p55; (2) Dionysius' account of the sacrament of oil in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is not found in most other patristic sources, except for those in the Syrian tradition. See Louth, Dionysius the Areopagite, (1987), p64; (3) his understanding of monasticism. See Louth, Dionysius the Areopagite, (1987), p70. Louth is certain that Dionysius/Denys was writing in Syria. See p.14 and passim.

↑In support of this view, there is no trace at all of these 'lost' treatises: despite the interest in Dionysius from as early as the sixth century, no mention of them is to be found. See Louth, Dionysius the Areopagite, (1987), p20.

↑Paul Rorem and John C Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Areopagite, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p39

↑Paul Rorem and John C Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Areopagite, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p38

↑Paul Rorem and John C Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Areopagite, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp1-3. Rorem and Lamoreaux produce a translation of about two-thirds of John's Prologue and Scholia on pp144-263.

↑The great Abbey of Saint-Denis just north of Paris claimed to have the relics of Dionysius. Around 1121, Pierre Abélard, a Benedictine monk at Saint Denis Basilica, turned his attention to the story of their patron saint, and disentangled the three different Dionysiuses. The monks were offended at the apparent demotion of Saint Denis, and Abélard did not remain long at Saint Denis. The elimination of this confusion, of course, did not remove the more fundamental confusion concerning the identification of pseudo-Dionysius.

↑ 38.038.1"It must also be recognized that “forgery” is a modern notion. Like Plotinus and the Cappadocians before him, Dionysius does not claim to be an innovator, but rather a communicator of a tradition. Adopting the persona of an ancient figure was a long established rhetorical device (known as declamatio), and others in Dionysius' circle also adopted pseudonymous names from the New Testament. Dionysius' works, therefore, are much less a forgery in the modern sense than an acknowledgement of reception and transmission, namely, a kind of coded recognition that the resonances of any sacred undertaking are intertextual, bringing the diachronic structures of time and space together in a synchronic way, and that this theological teaching, at least, is dialectically received from another. Dionysius represents his own teaching as coming from a certain Hierotheus and as being addressed to a certain Timotheus. He seems to conceive of himself, therefore, as an in-between figure, very like a Dionysius the Areopagite, in fact." Pseudo-Dionysius in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

↑Hathaway, Hierarchy and the Definition of Order in the Letters of Pseudo-Dionysius, p. 31

↑"One might ask why it is necessary [in the Pseudo-Dionysian Corpus] to have an ordered hierarchy of angels at all in the Christian tradition, considering that the Bible has no concept of celestial hierarchy....That it was found necessary to invent a system of this nature [in the Pseudo-Dionysisn Corpus] after 500 years is tantamount to denying the efficacy of Christ as mediator altogether." Rosemarie A. Arthur "The Pseudo Dionysius as Polemicist: The Development and Purpose of the Angelic Hierarchy in Sixth Century Syria" London: Ashgate, 2011, pp. 63-64.

↑Andrew Louth Dionysius the Areopagite1987, reissued 2001 under the title Denys the Areopagite. See Secondary sources below.

Modern translations

Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987) [The only complete modern English translation (and the only modern English translation of The Celestial Hierarchy), based almost entirely on the text in Migne]

Hathaway, Ronald F, Hierarchy and the definition of order in the letters of Pseudo-Dionysius. A study in the form and meaning of the Pseudo-Dionysian writings, (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1969), [Includes a translation of the Letters on pp130–160]